This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

The Charlie Hebdo attacks and Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission

Say what you will about Michel Houellebecq, France’s most famous and controversial fiction writer, but his timing is impeccable — although a little uncanny.

Houellebecq’s novel Soumission, about the election of an Islamic government in France, had not been on the shelves for more than a few hours on Jan. 7 when Chérif and Saïd Kouachi forced their way into the Paris offices of the satirical weekly newsmagazine Charlie Hebdo to — in their words — avenge the Prophet Mohammed. Recurring crude caricatures of him in its pages had drawn the ire of Muslims around the world and inspired the most radical among them to action.

The late-morning rampage, as all now know, killed 12 people and kicked off a terror spree that led to the deaths of five other innocents.

Ahead of the release in France of Soumission (available in French in Canadian stores this week), he was being touted as a literary provocateur — a debauched and sex-obsessed racist whose Islamophobia had finally reached its summit.

The new book is set in a dystopian France of 2022, a country being pulled apart by political and religious strife and in which the populace elects a charismatic Muslim Brotherhood candidate as president to block the ascendant, extreme right-wing Front Nationale. Backed by docile political and cultural elites, the country of liberté, égalité et fraternité becomes one of Sharia law and polygamy in the course of 300 pages.

ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW

Soumission doesn’t take the literary trick as far as George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but France’s conversion is a done deal when the story reaches its ambiguous end. Women have fled the workforce, retreating behind the veil. Gulf State sheiks shower the country with their petrodollars. That prestigious seat of learning, the Sorbonne, becomes “the Islamic University of Paris-Sorbonne.” And France is the entry point for an Islamic movement with its eye on the rest of Europe.

A regular Houellebecq reader could easily conjure up his literary treatment of the rampage in Paris from any of the narrators of his earlier works. They are almost uniformly detached, sexually depraved men. Most seem to have been cast autobiographically by the writer, who declared in 2001 that of all the faiths, “the stupidest of religions has to be Islam.”

After surviving a terrorist attack on Western sex tourists in Thailand in the 2001 book Platform, for example, the narrator — a bureaucrat in the French culture ministry — reflects on his stewing hate while convalescing.

“Every time I heard that a Palestinian terrorist, or a Palestinian child or a pregnant Palestinian woman, had been gunned down in the Gaza Strip, I felt a quiver of enthusiasm at the thought of one less Muslim in the world.”

Houellebecq has made his name with such raw and unflinching writing — along with his quasi-pornographic depictions of sex, an act he has presented as one of few primal forces binding together otherwise self-interested humans.

ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW

Coincidentally, Houellebecq was the figure being skewered on the cover of Charlie Hebdo the day of the terror attack on the magazine. The writer was cast as a physically repulsive, chain-smoking Nostradamus in a cartoon that mocked at once his startling physical transformation in recent years from well-coiffed hotshot to unkempt troll and Soumission’s prediction of a Muslim menace at the gates of Europe.

Yet the writer’s real-life reaction to the shooting, which claimed the life of his close friend Bernard Maris, an economist and contributor to the magazine, showed a humanity and sense of kinship not found in his books.

Yet at a time when the risks to provocateurs like Houellebecq and Charlie Hebdo are sketched in blood, the novelist was unrepentant.

“You can’t say you are free to write what you want but that you have to do it responsibly,” he told his interviewer. “There are no limits on freedom of expression — zero limits.”

Houellebecq was born in 1958 on the French island of Réunion, east of Madagascar. As a young boy, his hippie parents shipped him off to live with his maternal grandparents in Algeria. Later he was passed off to his father’s mother in France.

While studying agronomy at university he began writing poetry. After his studies he suffered from depression and was hospitalized several times. Eventually, he worked as a computer programmer.

In 1991 he published a biography of writer H.P. Lovecraft. Renown came with his first novel, Whatever, which appeared in 1994, when he was 36.

Notoriety followed. Among the recurring targets of his novels are absent parental figures who are condemned and killed off — a plot twist seen as vengeance for his childhood abandonment.

There have been a number of controversies over the course of Houellebecq’s career.

In 2002, he had to defend himself against a lawsuit brought by French Muslim groups alleging that his “stupidest of religions” comment the previous year incited hatred. He won the case.

The national shock that followed the Paris terror attacks prompted Houellebecq to cancel the French portion of his book tour, although French bookstores reportedly sold more than 150,000 copies in the first week.

Politicians have had their say, too. The left denounced him as a xenophobe while the right has insisted that his work of fiction mirrors current events.

“What’s very interesting about this book is that it is a work of fiction but a fiction that could one day become a reality,” said Front Nationale leader Marine Le Pen. She appears in the book as the presidential contender who is defeated by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Ben Abbes.

Meanwhile, the author, 56, expressed concern earlier this week that the timing of his book has heaped upon him the unwieldy task of defending himself against charges of Islamophobia while upholding the right of authors everywhere to publish work that may be interpreted that way.

That would be an unfortunate diversion for a novel whose depiction of the Muslim faith is nearly absent of any overt violence, and in which France’s Islamic embrace is treated almost as a logical next step.

Houellebecq’s primary worry, it seems, is the societal framework that France and the and the Western world more broadly are losing rather than the forces that rise up to replace it.

That was the theme of 1998’s Elementary Particles, the story of two brothers, one a tortured sex-addict and the other a molecular biologist whose scientific discoveries lead to the end of sexual reproduction.

The Map and the Territory, which won Houellebecq the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary prize, in 2010, also featured a country decimated by economic decline and forced to convert to tourism and agriculture for its survival.

The crisis in Soumission is spiritual but also cultural. It deals with the things that fall by the wayside when a people lose sight of their common identity. When the narrator’s Jewish girlfriend flees to Israel with her family rather than risk life under the new Islamic regime (France is already the main source of immigrants to Israel, with 7,000 French citizens emigrating last year), she tears up at the thought of leaving her homeland. Yet she can barely manage to name one concrete thing she is leaving behind.

More from The Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com